BANISHING COMPETITION

Bob Rhoden

Seventeen years ago I came to Richmond to pioneer a new church. The prophet Joel described young men seeing visions, and at twenty-six, my vision was to see this infant congregation of twelve become a large, mature church.

When I shared my vision at a denominational fellowship, I expected encouragement. But one of the older pastors looked me straight in the eye and said, “Young man, you work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.” That was it; no one even bothered to respond to his statement.

Driving home I risked asking the two ministers in our car if they felt bothered by what our colleague had said. They replied, “You have to understand that’s just the way a lot of ministers feel.”

The often-unspoken and invisible competition between churches had become spoken and visible. At that point I had to decide how I would respond to competition among like-minded churches-and their pastors. Since I didn’t want to play that game, I began to work out the plan I have employed over the years.

Focus on the Word. In those early years, I decided to concentrate on clearly preaching the Word. Parishioners expect fresh bread when they come to church. Everybody will not prefer my brand of bread, but at least I can serve mine fresh.

This decision has helped me deal with people who visit our church-or even join-but later decide they prefer another pastor’s preaching. If they leave because of preaching, I am free to say: “You need to be in a church where you can develop your Christian life, and under a pastor’s ministry that is meeting your needs. Go with my blessings.”

If I am investing time in the Word each week, then I am doing my job. I have not failed them. I can accept the fact that people may prefer another pastor. I don’t have to feel personally inadequate.

Focus on people. Besides the Word, I want to communicate “people priorities.” Our church slogan is “Touching people.” We’ve never conducted an attendance contest because we feel contests send a message that a church is interested in its image ahead of people. We want to put people’s needs first, and let numbers take care of themselves.

I pastor a church somewhat like my wife plays table games. Win or lose, she desires only to be with people and interact with them amiably. I hope to carry some of that spirit into pastoring. I don’t want to talk about winning or losing, only about how well we interact.

Focus on others. A common flaw in human nature is to think we make ourselves look better by making someone else look worse. Churches, like people, sometimes fall into this trap.

We make it a point not to try to polish our image by degrading others. Jesus said in Luke 16:12: “If you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?” We feel being trustworthy means we respectfully acknowledge the good in others.

When I ask people in our Sunday evening service to share the good things God is doing in their lives, I often remind them of the ABCs of sharing: it must be audible, brief, and Christ centered. Occasionally someone will still make an inappropriately negative reference to another denomination or church. When that person is finished, I often refer to some friend in that denomination or church and tell how we appreciate the various churches God uses to benefit the kingdom of God. It diffuses any sense of superiority or competition.

Focus on missions. In forming our church, we decided “mothering” new churches would be one of our goals. Although we fumbled our way into church planting, we have, to date, planted five other churches in our city. By making clear that we were founding churches as part of our reason for being, we helped dispel the climate of competition. We’ve grown to about a thousand, but another thousand attend the other five churches we started. It’s hard to look competitive when you’re giving yourself away.

Our vision is not limited to home missions. We’ve sent teams to third-world countries to construct church buildings, and have been joined by participants from a neighboring Presbyterian church.

The key to this kind of unity is building friendships and trust so our common goal of reaching the world for Christ does not get crushed in the machinery of denominational chauvinism.

Perhaps you’re wondering what happened to the pastor who wanted us to keep our distance. I count him as a good friend. As we focused on the right things, we discovered Richmond can always use more churches working both sides of the street.

-Bob Rhoden

West End Assembly of God

Richmond, Virginia

- More from Bob Rhoden

Pastors

Preaching Truth, Justice and the American Way

Rick McKinniss

Cultural assumptions affect what listeners sit for and what preachers must stand for.

Daniel Kaesler / EyeEm

I had acted innocently enough. Summer was approaching, and I was in need of fresh sermon ideas. So I prepared a bulletin insert asking for suggested texts or topics.

The first one in sizzled like a fuse on a Fourth of July firecracker: "Why don't you ever preach on patriotism? You need to preach on what our flag stands for!"

I felt torn: I didn't want to reject Fred's request out of hand or offend his national pride (he had served his country honorably in World War II), but I do not believe that truth, justice, and "the American way" are triune. I've always considered myself a loyal citizen, and I'm grateful for the liberties I enjoy, yet for me, national loyalties must bow before the Lordship of Christ. How could I possibly preach a biblical message on the American flag-especially the kind of message Fred would expect?

The next time I visited Fred, I said I would be on vacation the weekend of July 4 (true enough, but also a cop-out). I also explained I would be more comfortable preaching what the New Testament teaches concerning the duties of believers toward their nation, and I promised Fred I would do just that. He understood my position even though his expectation for a patriotic celebration was not met.

The encounter with Fred ended happily enough, with both our relationship and my sense of integrity intact. But his request got me thinking about the larger question of the influence of cultural values upon the Christian pulpit. I began to wonder about more subtle and often undetected influences of "the American way" on those of us who are called to preach The Way.

Reading Charles Larson's book, Persuasion: Reflection and Responsibility, I realized I wrestle with some cultural myths that are as American as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. By calling them myths I do not mean they are necessarily false-or true. Rather I mean they are so much a part of the way our culture interprets reality that we often fail to recognize them as anything but axiomatic. We grow up hearing them, breathing them, and thinking them. Though they have scant basis in biblical chapter and verse, I find they often creep unawares into my preaching.

Myth 1: The Possibility of Success

This is perhaps the most easily recognized American myth. It has fueled our country's ambition from the age of the earliest settlers to the recent "era of the entrepreneur."

This myth was popularized in the nineteenth century by Horatio Alger, who used this story line as the basis for several novels that told of a young man who through hard work, sincerity, honesty, and faith in the future was able to make good. Sometimes he would make it big and own his own company, gain a beautiful wife, enjoy a good life, and even do good for others. This bootstrap mythology is embodied today in "the American dream."

Positive thinking and possibility thinking thrive as richly in our American soil as corn does in Iowa. And to a certain degree, the appeal of the positive preachers (in churches both large and small) is due to the fact that we are uniquely prepared by our culture to receive these messages. This is not to suggest there is no biblical basis for preaching a positive message-countless verses speak hope, possibility, newness, and encouragement.

The dangers of canonizing Horatio Alger, however, are also apparent. Often "success" means only one thing to many people-health and wealth. Listeners hear that gospel of material success even when the preacher is encouraging them to new possibilities in the spiritual dimension.

Yet there is, I believe, an even subtler danger in employing this motif. I recall one sermon our pastor preached when I was a teenager. After dinner that Sunday I overheard my mother muttering as she washed the dishes.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I don't think the Lord is calling me to leave my family to be a missionary hero in Africa," she said, venting frustration. "I'm not likely to make a fortune in the near or distant future. But when I hear a sermon that describes all those heroic and successful people, I feel like a total failure. In what possible way can I do anything of consequence for God?"

The possibility of success had become for my mother the impossibility of significance. The heroes were too distant, the goals too high. She needed images of mothers and homemakers who gained ground for the kingdom in the kitchens where they lived.

The lesson of that episode with my mother has stayed with me, and every time I recruit Horatio Alger for the service of the gospel (which I do as often as any other red-blooded preacher), I try to picture my mother in my congregation. She and the rest of the congregation need to be encouraged to new possibilities but not driven to discouragement with impossibilities.

Myth 2: The Virtue of Challenge

A second myth, a cousin to the first, is quite simple: There is wisdom and strength that come only through great challenge and testing. These trials give access to special power, character, and knowledge.

This perspective lurks behind the conventional wisdom that suffering makes you a better person. Or we hear, "Going into the army will be the best thing for him." This story line is also evident in the way we narrate the lives of many great American heroes. Franklin Roosevelt's struggle with polio not only did not prevent him from becoming president, it uniquely equipped him (so goes the tale) to guide our nation through a crippling depression.

It is helpful to examine the component values in this belief. First, it suggests there is something good about suffering. Suffering promotes learning and maturity and emotional growth. Also, the value of challenge suggests that greatness needs to be tempered under fire. Both great accomplishment and great personal character result from successfully enduring the testing.

Yes, the worlds of politics, athletics, the arts, and business overflow with challenges and tests to overcome. So too, tests and trials mark the Christian journey. We read in James 1 that "the testing of our faith develops perseverance." And perseverance must "finish its work so that [we] may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." Romans 5 states the same thing even more boldly, "We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope."

But when our culture misapplies this truth, it can have damaging effects. I have become aware of this by walking with several church families through life-threatening, faith-threatening trials. Some trials squeeze the faith clean out of folks rather than mold them into more mature and purified believers. I'm not sure how to square this with James 1 and Romans 5. Nor am I fully equipped to answer the whys that fill my parishioners' eyes when they watch a child suffer, or see a cherished mate die prematurely, or listen to an Ethiopian student tearfully tell of the devastation of his homeland. I have seen doubt and bitterness fill the places of the heart where faith once dwelt secure.

Now I am better able to understand the elderly woman who confronted me years ago when, as a student intern, I preached my first sermon from James 1. I had blithely suggested that trials could be greeted as special delivery packages from God. These gifts could be unwrapped so we might discover new resources of perseverance and maturity.

She locked me in her gaze and spoke through tightly drawn lips. "Young man," she said, "I hope and pray you live a few more years and experience some of the things you talk about before you preach that sermon again."

She was right, of course. Not that there is no value in challenge-there is-but it is not always a blessing. Some challenges can be overwhelming, some trials overpowering. All tests are not endured victoriously. Folks in those situations need to hear another word of gospel. In addition to preaching the value of challenge, I have learned to preach:

– the need to live with mystery and unanswered questions

– the as-yet-unfinished struggle between God's kingdom and the forces of evil

– the need for genuine community and real caring for those who are walking in the valley of deep shadows

– and (frequently) the goodness of God, even though at times we can apprehend that goodness only by faith.

When folks are being sorely tested, I have learned they find more value in those sermons than in ones filled with the virtue of challenge.

Myth 3: The Wisdom of the Rustic

One of the enduring legends of our culture is the clever rustic. No matter how sophisticated or devious the opposition, the simple wisdom of the common man or woman wins out. Backwoods figures like Daniel Boone and Paul Bunyan, who outwit their adversaries and overcome great obstacles with clever but simple common sense, fill our folklore. Abraham Lincoln rode this image from the county courthouses of Illinois to the White House in Washington, D.C. The power of this image continues even today. Ronald Reagan developed his reputation as "the Great Communicator" not only because of his acting experience but because of his uncanny ability to speak the language of the common people.

The flip side of this faith in folk wisdom and reliance on initial instincts is a tendency to distrust the educated or intellectual. The disciplines of scholarship are often seen merely as tools of obfuscation (translation: too much book-larnin' gits in the way of clear-headed thinkin').

Those of us who believe in the simple gospel often find within us an accompanying desire to make simplistic the Bible's subtleties and to codify all the complexities of modern existence. In the small-town church in southern Ohio where I was raised, this was regular Sunday fare. We heard the ABCs of the gospel. We heard the four principles for successful marriage. We mapped the approaching finale of world history with a chart. We were taught to be suspicious of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and any other "ists" we might encounter.

Several crises of confidence later, I have learned that not all of life is simple, easy, or clear. And when the clear-cut answers I was given did not match the complexities of my own life and the lives of those I was called to serve, I felt a bit betrayed. I began to understand why so many have thrown over the faith when life gets rocky.

Fortunately, I have not done so. Nor have I lost my appreciation for the rustic wisdom with which I was raised. Common sense and intuition often serve quite well. But I have found that God also uses diligent study, solid research, and educated reasoning.

Just as it is our task to explain the difficult, at times our task is also to portray life as complex. Not all wisdom arises from the rustic's simplicity. When the congregation is led to seek wisdom from the learned as well as from the common, when the biblical message is proclaimed in all its mysterious fullness, our people are better equipped to face the world as it really is.

Myth 4: The Presence of Conspiracy

Another widespread cultural premise is the presence of conspiracy: a belief that behind most major political, economic, or social problems is a powerful group that has conspired to create them. American history is filled with suspicions of Masonic conspiracies, Populist conspiracies, and international banking conspiracies. In my own lifetime I have heard conspiracy theories connecting John F. Kennedy and the Vatican. I've heard of Cuban and KGB involvement in JFK's assassination and a conspiracy of American blacks to burn down and take control of all major U.S. cities. I've been warned of a conspiracy of right-wing religious groups to undermine democracy. The list could go on and on.

The validity of any of these theories is not my point here. I'm only illustrating our tendency to spread such explanations for certain trends and events.

Usually such explanations attract persons or groups who feel threatened. Conspiracy theories inevitably involve the infamous "they." Usually "they" have labels-right-wingers or left-wingers or humanists or media-types. Labels tend to confirm sinister suspicions and motivate us by our fears. "They" often find their way into our sermons.

Shortly before the last presidential election, I stopped by a number of churches on ministerial errands. Several of the churches had copies of the previous Sunday's sermons available. Wanting to see what these colleagues were preaching, I took copies and read them. I learned of three separate conspiracies responsible for our nation's downfall-all of them centered within a few square miles of us! The three "theys" were extremely disparate groups. But the respective preachers were confident the respective "theys" were behind our country's ills, and their congregations were duly urged to become involved in the campaign to turn "them" out.

Only once have I even met one of "them." He is a member of my congregation, a health teacher at the local middle school. Before I came to the church, Mike was attacked from various local pulpits as one of "those" who taught "values-less" sex education. I discovered that Mike, a committed and sensitive Christian, was trying to walk the tightrope between his Christian values and the realities of public education. In working with those eighth-graders, he was careful to emphasize the church and home as key influences in decision making. But because he was "one of them," more than one local pastor excoriated him from the pulpit, and Mike was besieged with phone calls, letters, and visits from irate parents.

Now, whenever I hear conspiracies preached, I cannot help but think of a disillusioned Mike, harassed and harangued by professing brothers and sisters who were more willing to believe in a conspiracy than in a brother's good intentions for their children.

Myth 5: The Desire for a Messiah

The fifth cultural orientation leads us, when in the midst of difficulty or disaster, to look for deliverance through strong leaders.

During the unemployment and resultant despair of the 1930s, Americans looked to Franklin Roosevelt to lead them once again to the promised land of happy days. In the 1950s, the threat was the worldwide advance of communism, and many fearful Americans rallied around Senator Joseph McCarthy as the guardian of the free world. The sixties and early seventies saw a decline in the power of this cultural myth. But in the eighties, names like Reagan and Iacocca stand for strong leadership, which many people again find attractive.

Obviously, this is a sensitive myth to discuss in terms of Christian preaching. Even to call it a myth raises our apprehensions, for we preach the true Messiah, who is able to save to the uttermost those who place their trust in him. It is certainly a positive thing that our culture prepares the people to whom we preach to expect to find help and salvation in a person of great power and wisdom. This intense optimism is noticeably lacking in many other cultures, making belief more difficult.

Yet, like the other cultural premises, this one is not without difficulties. They appear when we seek to persuade others to follow Jesus the Messiah. Jesus is seen as just one of many saviors. His message of salvation sits on the shelf alongside a host of other great hopes, which range from the latest technologies to the newest cult leader.

While for the most part the church has been quite effective in pointing out false messiahs, a more subtle danger is the temptation to falsely present the true Messiah-to distort the deliverance he offers.

During my college days, a friend involved in our campus parachurch organization told me about Bill, a recent convert.

Bill was slated to share his testimony at a meeting held at a fraternity house on a nearby campus. Following Bill's testimony, a brief presentation of the gospel would be given by one of the staffers. Normally, the staff member would check out testimonies in advance to insure they would be clear, concise, and Christ centered. But in the rush of a busy week, that precaution had been overlooked.

Bill's story soon had the attention of everyone in the room, especially the staff worker. Bill told of a difficult home life, of an even tougher existence in the inner city, of gang wars and drugs and robberies. He went on to tell of barely squeaking into college and then of his glorious conversion to Christ, which had completely transformed his life. He had been miraculously delivered from drug addiction, and his new life was one of peace, meaning, and happiness.

The staff member stared in utter amazement, especially since he knew 95 percent of the story was not within ninety-five miles of the truth! He cut short the meeting and hustled Bill out of the frat house.

"What were you doing in there?" he demanded. "You know none of that stuff is true!"

"I know," replied Bill. "But I thought that's what a testimony was-a wild story about how terrible your life was before you became a Christian and then about how great it is after you are saved."

It was a sad example of the overuse of the coming-of-Savior story line in an attempt to persuade others in the name of the Messiah. Few of us would be tempted to go to such extremes, yet we all know how easy it is to build up the claims of emotional peace and the solving of problems accompanying conversion.

I have discovered in more than one counseling session that when these overstated claims knock heads with reality, all too often faith gets bruised. The genuine glory of our Savior is tarnished whenever we don't preach the true Messiah and his salvation as carefully and truthfully as we can.

We do not face a clear-cut choice between preaching Christ or preaching cultural myths. We are called to proclaim Christ-and by necessity we do so in the context of our cultural assumptions.

Cultural premises are part of the way we think, and therefore part of the way in which we seek to persuade. Likewise, the predispositions are part of the way our congregations listen and make choices. These cultural premises can be powerful persuasive tools. Our job is to employ them with an eye toward discernment and fairness-without compromise.

It is not simply a matter of preaching truth, justice or the American way. Nor of preaching truth, justice, and the American way. But rather it is a matter of preaching in an American way without doing injustice to The Way of truth.

Rick McKinniss is pastor of Emmaus Baptist Church in Northfield, Minnesota

Leadership 86Â Fall 58

- More from Rick McKinniss

Pastors

FUNDAMENTALLY ONE

Marshall Shelley and Kevin Miller

An interview with Truman Dollar

Fundamentalist churches suffer from many stereotypes, but unity isn't one of them. The common image is usually one of scraps and splits. But if Truman Dollar isn't careful, he's likely to change that image.

During his sixteen-year pastorate at the Kansas City (Missouri) Baptist Temple, he saw the all-white congregation become racially integrated and at the same time grow to an average attendance of 1,800.

Two years ago he went to the ten-thousand-member Temple Baptist Church in the Detroit suburb of Redford. In addition to directing the diverse ministry there, he writes a monthly column for the Fundamentalist Journal, often calling into question divisive practices in the church.

The son of a Baptist minister, Dollar began preaching at age fifteen. He graduated from the University of Missouri, where he was president of both the honor society and the student body, then served churches in Florida, Missouri, and Michigan before becoming senior pastor in Kansas City in 1968.

LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Kevin Miller went to Detroit to explore his ideas on how to bring solidarity and concord to a church.

With all the other concerns facing pastors, is establishing unity all that important?

Unity is vitally important if for no other reason than the fact it validates the gospel. There aren't many things more important than that.

You can't expect to win people to Christ when the body is fragmented and warring.

When Jesus prayed in John 17 that the church be unified, what kind of unity was he referring to? Doctrinal unity? An emotional affection for one another? A sense of common mission?

In the New Testament, the church had to decide whether it would include both Jews and Gentiles. It had to decide if men and women would both be involved. It had to decide if it was a church for free men and slaves. From Acts 15 and Galatians 3:28, we understand the church clearly decided it would include them all. It opted for diversity. Yet in that diversity, it clearly had unity. I see three types.

1. Functional unity, which involves the church's organizational tools: gifted leaders, structure, its goals, and its mission-carrying the gospel around the world, baptizing people, and discipling them.

2. Doctrinal unity. There were some limits beyond which you could not go, such as accepting the teaching of the Judaizers or the Libertines. The early church leaders talked a lot about heretics. They were willing to disrupt temporarily the church's unity to create a stronger, lasting unity of doctrine. They insisted that grace must be taught.

3. The church's spiritual unity is captured in Jesus' summary of the Law: loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself.

Spiritual unity has a vertical dimension, a unity with God-holiness. The Bible lists sins that God hates, which break our unity with him: uncleanness, filthiness, whoremongering-behaviors and lifestyles that affect the purity of the church.

Spiritual unity also has a horizontal dimension, a humble regard for others that overcomes schisms. For example, in Philippians Paul calls divisions carnal; he reprimands Euodia and Syntyche; and he begs them to have the humility, the servant mind, of Christ. Spiritual unity is by far the most difficult of the three.

Is this kind of unity possible, or in a fallen world do we have to settle for something less?

I don't think we ought to look for less. That would be like saying, "We're going to keep only nine of the Ten Commandments," or "We're going to give 8 percent instead of a full tithe." Neither do I think we should say, "Some disunity is acceptable."

Complete unity is what we're after. Yet in a fallen world you constantly have people like Diotrephes in the church, and you have to deal with them because they disrupt a church's unity.

We have never achieved perfect unity in a local church any more than any of us has been completely transformed into the image of Christ. It is a process that is ongoing, one that will not be realized ultimately and perfectly until Jesus comes back and is completely in charge. But that is the goal. To be willing to accept less is sin.

What does unity in the church look like? Can you think of a specific time when you saw it, at least in embryonic form?

I was on the staff of the Kansas City church for twenty-three years, seven as an associate and sixteen as senior pastor. At one point I'd spent half my life there. One Sunday morning I stood up and said, "A family in our church is about to lose their house unless they receive $2,000 by the end of the day. You don't need to know who they are, but trust me that they're godly people. We're not going to vote on it. If you feel strongly about this, I'll be at the door following the service, and you can stop and give me a check."

Before the service my wife had said, "Are you going to set a bad precedent?"

I said, "I don't know. All I know is that I'm hurting because this family is going to lose its house."

Before the day was over, people had given over $2,000. When I announced it, there was a sense of euphoria in the congregation. Together we had done something bold and creative to help someone and hadn't worried about setting precedents.

Another incident involved three men, one Caucasian, one Hispanic, and one black. All three worked at TWA, and all three hated each other. Then, within six months or so, all three of them began attending the church.

About fifteen years later in a testimony meeting, Sam, the black man, stood up. Here's a guy who had been an organizer for the NAACP. When Martin Luther King was shot, he flew to Atlanta for the big march at Emory University. Sam said, "I remember when I used to look at Bill and Augie and despise them because of my racism. And now we meet at lunch for prayer." Bill and Augie both stood and confirmed how meaningful they found those prayer times. All three had come to the same church, all three had become Christians, and all three in one testimony meeting got up and talked about being reconciled in Christ.

Can you strategize harmony? Does it require planning and forethought? Or is it simply a gift from God quite unrelated to human effort?

As we teach people to develop the mind of Christ, we build unity. But it is impossible to muscle unity in a church. Unity doesn't begin with strategies; it begins with people. Personhood precedes program.

Yet the way we do things does make a difference. If I do not have integrity as a leader, if I do not model the mind of Christ, unity won't happen in the congregation, because the things that help produce unity won't flow out of my life.

Let me illustrate. One thing I do is I insist on giving the congregation sufficient information about the church's finances. I want them to know how resources are being allocated and that their money is being handled well. This helps prevent disunity. But that wouldn't happen if I didn't care about honesty and integrity.

So unity in a congregation doesn't come from the members up. It comes from the leaders down.

Yes. I believe God has ordained a vehicle to accomplish unity: gifted leaders (Eph. 4:11-12), men and women who know the power of the Holy Spirit. What happens in the church begins with its leaders. As a natural result of these leaders exercising their leadership function, unity flows.

A church can be diagrammed in what I call concentric circles of commitment. At this church, the center circle includes the pastoral staff and chairman of the deacons. The next circle out from the center is the finance committee. The next circle, the deacons. Then the Sunday school superintendents, then the Sunday school teachers, then those who come Sunday night and Wednesday night, and so on, all the way to the periphery. When I teach about the unity of the body, or give out financial information, or do anything, I start with the core. They become informed and committed and help me reach out and include the next circle and then the next. It ripples outward until the entire church is discipled and informed.

What's the biggest impediment to unity that you face?

Autonomy. The opposite of unity is not disunity as much as autonomy. By that I mean individuals refusing to submit to the teaching of the Scripture by the gifted leaders whom God gave authority.

How do the gifted leaders avoid becoming autonomous themselves?

Paul tells Timothy, "Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine." You have to be careful to submit yourself to the doctrine given by God. You also have to submit yourself to other leaders the church has ordained.

In what areas is unity most difficult to achieve?

The racial issue is the most difficult by far. When I came to the church in Kansas City, it was not racially integrated. I began to teach these principles, and within two or three years we accepted our first black family. When I left almost twenty years later, we had a black deacon who in the last election received more votes than anyone else. Progress comes slowly.

Here at Temple Baptist, we're still struggling with the racial issue. Minorities make up about 18 percent of the student body of our Christian school. In sixty years we had never had a black preacher speak-until last year. Dr. S. M. Lockridge was one of the highlights of our summer Bible conference. We have a few blacks in the morning service every week, but the problem is not overcome. That eats at me because l understand it's a spiritual dysfunction. It's not something we work on just for the public or the media.

In working for oneness within a congregation, what's been the price tag for you personally?

First of all, there is an incredible investment of emotional energy, an investment of yourself. This is true regardless of the church's size, though it certainly becomes more difficult as the church gets larger. The Dallas Morning News once interviewed W. A Criswell and asked, "How can you possibly know twenty-five thousand people?"

Criswell answered, "I know two groups of people in this church-all the key leaders and all the kooks."

This church has ten thousand members, with about three thousand average attendance. Every Sunday I shake hands with a thousand people. Each week a lady prepares for me a list of ten families with their pictures and brief biographies. I memorize them, and the next Sunday I pick out those ten families and greet them. All of this builds personal credibility so you can invest yourself in their lives spiritually, and ultimately, it helps bring unity.

I also pay a huge emotional price when someone is disrupting the body, especially when I must confront moral impurity. I believe in confrontation, but I pay the price when I have to meet someone and say, "I understand this is true, and as Matthew 18 commands, I want to talk with you about it."

One of the toughest confrontations is with a person who has a chronic negative attitude. It's difficult to call that a church discipline case. How do you act in situations that are not clear-cut moral violations?

Several years ago an executive for a large corporation served on our finance committee in Kansas City. He was a bright man, but for two years he constantly brought up petty criticisms: "You're 1 or 2 percent over budget in disbursements." I listened, tried to give him information, and reasoned with him. But he kept carping, and that pains you when you know you're not doing anything outrageous or ethically wrong.

I finally called the comptroller of the huge corporation where this man worked. I asked him what budgeting margins they maintain and found they weren't anywhere near their projections. They'd projected a break-even year and in the first six months lost $88 million.

So I confronted this man in the presence of the finance committee, not as a smart aleck, but simply to say, "Don't demand standards of us that your own industry cannot maintain. Be reasonable." That was painful, but it had to be done. The man finally resigned, which was a good thing, though I don't like that ever to happen. He simply began to realize he was a continual irritant and nobody was paying attention to him any longer.

Would you say that most discord starts with this kind of personality wrinkle, rather than significant theological differences?

Disunity rarely comes from legitimate theological disagreements. It comes from people who are acting autonomously, who are not obeying the Scripture: "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." That's where Paul had most of his problems.

What's the difference between being autonomous and being a strong, independent thinker? You want people in the congregation who can take initiative.

Instead of calling them independent, I call these people secure in Christ. People who are secure in Christ offer some of the brightest and most helpful ideas for the growth of the church. And they can be aggressive.

But here's the difference: They offer ideas, do homework, take initiative, and still maintain the mind of Christ. When the body has made its decision, they don't continue to lobby or create dissent. The autonomous person, on the other hand, maintains his position long after the vote and says, "You're all wrong."

Has there been a time when you have had to be "the secure Christian," when you wanted one thing and the church acted counter to that?

Not officially, because of my style of leadership: I don't allow a vote until I see we're unified. I refuse to maintain my autonomy by going into a meeting with a strong design and forcing a vote. We discuss it and work it over until we reach a consensus. In sixteen years as senior pastor in Kansas City, I had only one negative vote as a result.

Of course, this means I may change my position radically during the course of a meeting. We wanted to build a new center some years ago, and I was ready to go. I went into the meeting with an entire finance plan laid out. But during the discussion, I realized, as they did, it was too soon, and we backed off. We ended up waiting two more years. But I didn't go home from those meetings offended. I try to avoid being adversarial.

Do new pastors usually have to wait several years before the congregation rallies around them and their vision for the church?

You can expect disagreement at the outset of most pastorates. When I became senior pastor in Kansas City, I had not chosen any of the staff members. So they didn't have my mindset. But time is usually on the pastor's side. Over the years, they adopt the pastor's mindset and goals or they feel increasingly uncomfortable. If a staff member cannot adjust after some years, he generally chooses to leave.

Time also helps resolve other problems. Since I've been in Detroit, we've had 225 families join the church. These people came partly because they respond to my style of preaching and leadership. So the longer a pastor stays, the more likely the church will assume his philosophical image through a natural process. Other members also remain because pastor and people mutually adjust.

How might a pastor inadvertently contribute to disunity in the body?

One of the biggest problems is the inability to shift roles in ministry. It's a weighty thing to stand in the pulpit on Sunday with this Book in your hand, representing God. And it's tough to shift from that role.

You walk in Monday morning and tell the secretary, "Order a trainload of paper clips."

The secretary says, "Are you sure we need a trainload?"

You think, You're talking to God's man. Yesterday I stood with the Book in my hand with an infallible message. Some pastors simply are not able to shift gears and understand that on Monday morning the secretary may have infinitely more information about how many paper clips to order than the pastor does.

When people don't make this distinction, they stand in the pulpit and they're the pastor. Then they go home to their children, and they're still the pastor because they can't shift roles. It ends up that the child has neither a parent nor a pastor. That causes a dysfunction in the home. In a church, it breeds disunity.

Another danger is what David Jeremiah calls the "I-thou" approach to preaching, that somehow what I say from the pulpit as the representative of God applies to you but does not apply to me. So I can preach against sin but somehow be involved in it at the same time. We've all been shattered in recent years by the number of casualties in the ministry from this. When a person stands in the pulpit and says, "Here's what God said," but doesn't let that affect him in any way, congregations are destroyed.

Are some issues worth standing for even if they cost the church its unity?

I am willing to die for what Dr. Bob Ketcham used to call the "irreducible minimum"-the gospel message, the redemptive work of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture.

I am willing to split a church for the integrity of the institution-in my case, Baptist distinctives.

On practically everything else, I am not willing to fight. Take eschatology. I'm strongly pre-trib, pre-mill, but many matters of eschatology are just not that clear, so I tolerate other viewpoints while I preach what I believe the Bible teaches.

Do you often preach on the theme of unity?

I preach on it but don't call it that.

Then how do you approach it?

I cover the biblical principles about loving one another. And I talk about the fundamentalists who blast each other in the periodicals. I really raise the Devil about that.

Have you found that some well-intentioned actions to build accord can actually backfire and cause discord?

Time and again I see massive building programs without a plan to pay for them. The pastor says, "God told me to do it, and so God will have to come through." I've seen these churches go bankrupt, which really hurts me. In one major southern city, five large independent churches were all in the newspapers because of failed bond issues. All of that came from the same mentality: "God told me." How do you argue against that?

Another thing that causes repeated problems is building a family dynasty. "God told me to make my son the pastor and my daughter-in-law the secretary." Every pastor I know who was dynastically inclined at some time had problems over family. In twenty-five years I've never had a child work for me in any capacity. I get enough criticism without that.

One means of trying to build loyalty is talking up the threat of attack. "We are the remnant people and some group out there is persecuting us." Is that a valid method?

I think a lot of anticommunist preaching, for example, has been in many cases just a unity-building and fund-raising tool. As Eric Hoffer observed over twenty-five years ago in The True Believer, "It's easier to unify people through hate than through love."

I've seen people milk those crusades and then I have seen their organizations fall apart because either the issues are removed or people lose their intensity. You don't build a church based on your opposition to abortion or pornography or your hatred of Keynesian economics. I'm not going to put my neck on the line for some political candidate and then find that the expletives have to be deleted. (Laughter)

We ought never support things that harm the gospel. God has called us to be ambassadors of Christ. Having said that, we are the light of the world and the salt of the earth. In that salt ministry, there is the responsibility to say pornography is wrong and abortion is murder. But the foundation of the church can't be an anti-something crusade. You build it on the redemptive work of Christ.

How much thought do you to give to the external things that unify you and the congregation? Do you consciously buy a General Motors car, say, because a lot of people in the church work at GM?

I think a lot about those things. Maybe there's nothing spiritual about them, but they're so simple to do. And you don't want to unnecessarily put barriers between people and the gospel you preach.

I mean, here in Detroit I'm not about to buy a foreign car. I'm the last guy who changes hair style and the last guy to change his style of clothes. I'm not going to grow a mustache. Not because I think any of those things are immoral, but people look at changes in your appearance and somehow believe something's happened inside. So I try not to shock them with any of these things. I'm very conscious of being conservative in dress and manner and speech.

I don't think it's any price to pay at all to do these things. You don't have to be a preacher to do it. Bankers watch what kind of cars they drive. Salesmen do. Surely they're not smarter than we are. (Laughter)

How has your thinking on this subject changed over the years?

I was on my first church staff at age nineteen and started pastoring at twenty-one. I realize now my ministry was basically strategizing how to outsmart people. I didn't understand body life; I didn't understand the gifts. I felt there was a difference between pastors and lay people in essence, not just function. So in my early ministry I had a lot of conflict. Unity was something I had to manipulate.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I was on the varsity debate team at the University of Missouri for three years. I was a good debater, and I let a lot of that creep into my leadership. I could outtalk anybody whom I pastored. I won a lot of battles. But I lost a lot of wars. I thought I had to win every time to maintain leadership.

I got tired of that. I realized it was hollow. I began to see what the Bible said and understand the Spirit of God had to bring unity as I faithfully taught people. It took time, but I have changed dramatically. I finally got to where I could say to a group of deacons, "You know, I really blew it." And when I did that, I found there was nobody to fight with. They would say, "We understand. We make mistakes, too."

So the urge to be right can block unity.

You don't have to be the repository of all truth to be a leader. You can be vulnerable and admit before a crowd, "I have made some mistakes and I've learned by them." Chuck Swindoll is probably the greatest at this. He knows just how far to go, to be vulnerable without simply dumping on people. I heard him tell a story about himself when he was accused of shoplifting, which was a great teaching tool.

I told this church once about some incidents during my early ministry. I had great success in building projects. The church built 452 units of senior citizens' homes. The whole project was worth twelve or thirteen million dollars. I began to realize I was good at financial management, and so with a couple of men in the church I got involved in a number of business ventures. They were very successful.

Nobody said a word to me, but I became deeply convicted that as a minister of the gospel, I needed to live by the gospel. I read those passages about being a soldier of Jesus Christ, and I just up and sold all my shares voluntarily. I never told anybody except my wife. Eight or ten years had to go by before I could admit I'd gotten so involved in that.

Preachers don't often admit they've made mistakes. I can understand that. I don't want to stand up and tell all the dumb and sinful things I've done. But if I don't open up, I often can't help people. So I've got to be transparent.

What was a mistake you made that caused a lot of disunity?

When I was a young preacher, twenty-one years old, I took a little church of about thirty-five people in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I led the church up to about two hundred, but the offerings were poor. We were running up deficits, yet I was dead set on having an additional staff member anyway. I figured everything had to be bigger and better and growing faster than the church down the street. You know, common nonsense. I got my way but ultimately lost the church. They didn't fire me, but I left because I saw the growing deficit. I was unwilling to admit I was wrong and being foolish.

Experiences like that helped me realize I'm not right every time. And I don't have to assert myself or lose my leadership every time. So now, instead of trying to manipulate unity, I try to just teach and model the mind of Christ, function as a leader, and let the Spirit of God bring unity.

In our church we have two little boys named Nick Maple and Frankie Galloway. One is four and the other is five. Both of them, in three months' time, came down with leukemia. I've seen our whole church rally around those boys in a very moving way.

Families have taken food for months. I've seen our families pour into the hospitals. I've seen them weep on a Sunday morning as we kneel, three thousand together, to pray for Nick and Frankie. The unity has been overwhelming to me. And it just arose. There was a functional unity, a doctrinal unity, and a spiritual unity preceding it that made it possible.

MINISTRY IN A MELTING POT

I was surprised to see Harriet in church yesterday. A faithful supporter of our church for over thirty years, Harriet has grown increasingly dissatisfied.

"If I hear one more 'Amen,' I'll remove my letter," she said not long ago. "Besides, why don't those black people go to their own church?"

Margaret is black and widowed, the mother of four children and six grandchildren. She first came to our church, she admits, "to get all I can from those white folks." As she got to know the people, she mellowed, then joined the church. Margaret especially appreciated our church when her husband, Gideon, died last year. One grandson, Larry, had taken it especially hard; his father abandoned the family before he was born and Gideon was the only dad he'd known. After Gideon died, Larry would return to Gideon's hospital room and cry, hold the curtains, and touch the bed, all trying to resurrect his granddaddy.

Margaret hasn't forgotten the day her white pastor brought Larry home. "We're going to see Granddaddy again," I promised. "He's in heaven, and we're going to see him again." Larry believed me and stopped visiting that empty hospital room.

Timothy, an elder of the old school, doesn't care for our worship services anymore. "A Boy Scout jamboree," he calls them. Joey, another elder who loves our worship services, always sits next to Timothy. As he raises his hands during the singing, he winks at Tim. "You are so dead!" he joked last board meeting.

But last week Timothy and Joey served Communion to a man dying of cancer. A month ago, they cooked a Saturday morning breakfast for fifteen street people who normally wouldn't eat until the soup kitchen opened Monday. Last Sunday they held hands in a circle of prayer as we sent Gary to Korea. Our board meetings inevitably wander into fruitless discussions of pneumatology, yet together, Timothy and Joey are turning their part of the world upside down.

We are white and black, young and old, charismatics and fundamentalists and liberals. Yet from our frightening diversity a new unity has begun to emerge.

College-educated and wealthy, seventy-five-year-old Martha has been attending our church for fifty years, but Martha can't stand Shaky Sam, who joined less than a year ago. "My Lord," she loudly whispers, "why does he have to come to our church?"

Martha dislikes Sam's street etiquette and his shaking, a casualty of too many Thunderbird bottles. Shaky, on the other hand, can't stand Martha's upper-middle-class breeding. But they work together at our food bank.

"Do you have to smoke in here?" Martha coughs. Shaky smiles and continues to blow smoke rings. Last Thanksgiving Sam and Martha served hot turkey dinners to 125 families.

Andy returned from a denominational study tour of Nicaragua last week. "It is clearly immoral to support the contras," Andy informed Douglas during Sunday's coffee hour. Doug nearly dropped his jelly doughnut on his new Florsheim wingtips. Douglas had cabled his congressman two days earlier and urged him to support the contra-aid bill. Only this morning he'd told his wife, "I wish we would just bomb the hell out of those communists."

Normally Andy and Doug avoid politics. Team teachers for a Bible study at a drop-in center, they hugged and wept together six months ago when Paul, who lives in a discarded refrigerator box on South Atlantic Avenue, committed his life to Christ.

We are the church. Not a Disneyland version, but the real church, with real problems, in a real place. The urgency of our task has driven us to find a higher unity.

In his book The Holocaust, Martin Gilbert describes a man named Michalowski. Michalowski, a Polish Jew, escaped from the Nazis shortly before he was to be executed. He fled to the home of a widow he knew.

"Let me in!" he pleaded. She slammed the door in his face. In desperation he knocked again.

"I am your Lord, Jesus Christ," he cried. "I came down from the cross. Look at me-the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent. Let me in."

Timothy and Joey, Martha and Sam, Andy and Douglas-they look beyond their substantial differences because the city is on our doorstep pleading for help. Joseph, a sixty-five-year-old who homesteads in the abandoned Bright Star Theater, is more important than our theological leanings. Marion, who lives in a vermin-infested apartment with only a faucet and hot plate, means more than our politics. We argue in our board meetings. But in the food bank, in the sanctuary, on the street, we become a symphony, varied instruments joining in one theme.

In our diversity we are nothing more than an anemic version of other social organizations. But in our unity, based on love, we are the body of Jesus Christ-literally the hope for all Creation.

-James P. Stobaugh

Fourth Presbyterian Church

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pastors

AIMING THE WORD

Carmon Goff

Jesus had what many present-day church members might call a bad habit-at least, if practiced by their pastor. He aimed his messages at his hearers.

Jesus didn’t talk to people who weren’t present. He didn’t direct pungent preachments at faraway political leaders. He didn’t preach about the terrible sinners who never came within earshot of his voice. He didn’t expound on theories related to a nation that existed two thousand years previously.

Jesus spoke to his audience. His sermons fit the occasion-situation preaching, you might call it. As far as he was concerned, those who needed a word from him on any given occasion were the ones who saw his lips move, who heard the inflections of his voice, who noticed how he gestured toward them.

But that kind of preaching gets us into trouble with our listeners. That kind of preaching pricks hearers’ hearts; it is always burning someone’s ears. Its words penetrate personalities. Such sermons disturb the status quo, sometimes inciting hostile response.

If we are to follow Jesus’ pattern, we’d better prepare for the response Jesus received. We’d better have a thick skin and forget about hurt feelings.

And we’d better maintain a friend-to-friend relationship with Jesus, from whom we can draw strength and encouragement.

-Carmon Goff

Church of Christ

Kimball, Minnesota

- More from Carmon Goff

Pastors

FACING THE WRECKAGE OF EVIL

Forum

Church leaders have it easy; they deal only with nice people. At least that is the common assumption.

But pastors encounter evil-twisted personalities and sorry situations-with regularity. Churches attract troubled people, and pastors are called into dark situations.

So how do you tackle the effects of evil? LEADERSHIP talked with four leaders whole experienced spiritual warfare:

-Harold Bussell, dean of the chapel at Gordon College and preaching pastor of First Congregational Church in Hamilton, Massachusetts.

-Mark Erickson, a physician with mission experience in Africa and pastor of Eastbrook Church in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

-Earl Palmer, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, California, who has also served pastorates in Seattle and the Philippines.

-Timothy Warner, who served as president of Fort Wayne Bible College after a missionary career in Sierra Leone, and is now director of professional doctoral programs at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

Leadership: Where do you see evil at work?

Earl Palmer: On two levels. One is bad choices. Choosing is part of the genuine freedom, within boundaries, God provided us, but through our bad choices we become alienated and experience the evil of garden-variety sin.

The other level is the Evil One tempting us to distrust God. Think of the biblical language for the Devil: the Twisted One, Slanderer, Accuser, even the Destroyer. Spiritual evil tempts me not only to distrust God but to distrust God’s will toward me.

Harold Bussell: There’s a tremendous propensity for self-preservation in evil. The Evil One tempts us not only with unbelief but also tries to convince us we’re in danger when we get near to God.

Timothy Warner: The issue, as I see it, is the glory of God. Satan wanted it; he was jealous of it. He’s trying to get us to buy his lie that we can be like gods and go it alone-we can run our own lives. That’s the fundamental evil. We sometimes become so preoccupied with the acts of sin that we forget the base of it is coming short of the glory of God. Sin and evil are known by proximity to holiness.

Bussell: It’s easy to assume that evil is not at work in success. Success woos us. Remember in the seventies when the Mary Hartman television series came out? Although it centered around popular themes like adultery and the brokenness of people’s lives, it was doomed to a short run because of its lower-class setting. Place a similar show in a wealthy, “successful” setting, and you have a long-term series like Dallas.

Evil can be at work in success, too. To the degree we deny evil’s existence, to an equal degree we are vulnerable to becoming evil. Evil always alters reality, and at the point we redefine reality, we are open to the demonic.

Leadership: How would you define evil?

Mark Erickson: I don’t think you can clearly define evil, because evil is wreckage.

It’s like we’re living in soup. The evil is within us as well as without, so it’s hard for us to get a sense of what’s normal. Getting to heaven will probably be like breaking out of muddy water into clean air.

Warner: Evil is fundamentally a perversion, or counterfeit, of something good. For example, God desires humility. Satan’s counterfeit is inferiority. Humility comes from examining God’s greatness. Feelings of inferiority come from examining myself and seeing my own weaknesses. Satan tries to get us to focus on ourselves.

Erickson: One trademark of evil is alienation-deep loneliness-which runs not only through, say, the homosexual community but right through the board of deacons.

Another trademark is spiritual shallowness. How much of a life can you build from eight hours of television a day? I knew men who became believers, yet it was years before they could get to Bible study and grow because they were so busy doing nothing! I’m indicting myself, too. We turn life into money, put it into a mutual fund, spend it, and have nothing to show for our lives. That disturbs me.

Leadership: Can you give examples of ways evil presents itself at your door?

Palmer: We first have to look inside the door, at ourselves, before we look outside. We need to understand our own vulnerability and our need to stay under the Word, under God’s grace. The line of alienation goes through not only our deacon board; it goes through us.

Erickson: When someone opposes us, it’s all too easy to consider that person the evil one. Not too long ago, two men squared off against each other, and one of them came and told me his side of things. When he was done, I thought the other person was Satan incarnate. The conflict was taking place in another church, so I stayed out of it. As I watched it develop, however, I began to realize both men were guilty, but each could see only the other’s guilt.

Bussell: I agree. It’s risky to identify evil in other people unless we’re in touch with how it operates in our own lives. True discernment comes from self-examination. Refusing to deal with our own potential for evil makes even our goodness dangerous.

For example, as ministers, we like to help people. But we can begin to enslave them if they become dependent on us; instead we must enable them to become healthy people dependent on God.

Leadership: How would the Evil One like to damage you?

Palmer: It’s like a pendulum. I can swing to the side of success, where I’m tempted to think that because things are going well or the budget is met or people are appreciating what I preach, I no longer need to be under discipline. Or that the doctrine of sin doesn’t really apply to me because I’ve been given a special position. That’s a common danger.

Swinging the other way is when I feel sorry for myself because I’ve met reversals or someone has confronted me, and that can happen just minutes after the first swing. It’s ironic. I can be riding the crest of power, and then in the same meeting someone will strike a vulnerable point, and I’ll think I’ve failed. I experience the temptation to distrust God and his good will for me at both ends.

Erickson: As pastors we tend to have a lot of power, whether we want it or not. I learned that when we made unanimity necessary for certain decisions in our church constitution. I thought it was a great idea until I started staying awake nights trying to figure out who was against what I wanted to do-you know, who was “spiritual” and who wasn’t. It’s a short step from there to thinking, These people are my enemies. And that’s evil.

The truth is, sometimes one person voting no has saved us from a poor decision. Once we were going to send a couple overseas, but two people said no. We had never said no to anyone before, so we wrestled with it. The nays stood firm, and the couple ended up not going. I have to believe that’s exactly what God wanted. The couple now has another vision that may be a better fit.

After a few of those things happened, I began to realize that pastors can want or have too much power, and evil often inhabits this excess power.

Bussell: One of the most tragic examples I’ve seen was the staff of a prominent church. Every year a psychology class visited the services there to study the abuse of power. It was so evident in relationships, even on the platform, that you could plan field trips to see it.

In another church, bitter feelings were all spiritualized under the carpet. I was invited to preach there, and when I arrived I found the staff in terrible turmoil. Yet the pastor got up in worship and asked the congregation to sing “There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit in This Place.”

In California, as a contrast, I worked in a church where the senior pastor had a grasp on the power of evil. He would say, “We’re in a power struggle. Let’s deal with it.” It seems the grace of God should free us to talk about power struggles openly, and out of that can come healthy relationships.

Warner: Christian life is the exciting struggle to keep your balance. To avoid evil on one side, our tendency is to overreact. Yet Satan is on all sides of the equation, as C. S. Lewis says, driving you into materialism, so you don’t believe in the demons, or driving you to an unhealthy interest in spiritualism, so you’re seeing demons behind every bush.

Leadership: How do you keep that balance when trying to help other people overcome the influence of the Evil One?

Warner: God operates in triangles; he doesn’t operate unilaterally very often. The “God told me to do this” idea has to be tested by the church and the Scriptures. God forces us to come together to confirm what he says to us and what he’s doing through us.

I’ve reluctantly gained a reputation for dealing with people who have demonic problems. Unfortunately there aren’t many Christians prepared to minister to such people, so the burden falls on a few. Those of us who are involved in such a ministry, however, need to be accountable to the church, but it has to be an informed accountability. I can’t be accountable to others for something they don’t understand.

Yet isolating myself and becoming a Lone Ranger is extremely dangerous. It can lead to evil.

Leadership: How do you help someone who is possessed?

Warner: Possession is a most unfortunate word, freighted with all kinds of wrong meanings, and I don’t think it’s a valid translation of the Greek. Demons can exert a degree of control but seldom total possession.

The people I deal with, for the most part, come because they hear I’ve dealt with demons. Some don’t have a demonic problem at all; they’re looking for an easy solution to a personal problem. But I need to balance that with the realization that many times demonic problems are real.

A young woman was referred by a counselor to my wife and me-we always work as a team-because therapy was simply not working. She was self-destructive. One of her aberrations was to beat herself with a hammer.

We tested for demonic influence and contacted a demon, who told us the woman didn’t consider herself a legitimate human being; she didn’t deserve to live. So we talked to the woman about that. She was an unwanted child, convinced both through the influence of the Evil One and her home life that she was worthless. She was under this kind of bondage. So we prayed that God would take her back to the earliest point in her life where that became a problem for her.

We prayed briefly, and she said, “I saw the Lord, and he was holding me. He had a big book in his hand, and he flipped through the pages until he came to my name.”

I opened my Bible and read, “All my days are written in your book before one of them came to be.” You could almost feel the tension drain out of her body. This was the turning point. After further therapy with a counselor, today she’s doing fine.

Leadership: How can you distinguish psychosis from the demonic? How do you know when you ought to probe for the presence of a demon?

Warner: If someone says he’s having problems he thinks are demonic, I go back and see what other factors are present. Problems may be rooted in relationships in the past.

But some symptoms point to demonic activity, and one learns to distinguish between emotional problems and demonization. For example, a psychotic person often is irrational, whereas a demon speaking through a person is quite consistent and rational. You need to recognize there will often be overlap. It’s seldom either/or; it’s usually a mixture of emotional problems, sin, and demons.

As you talk with the counselee, you may begin to see evidences of demonic manifestations. The demon may surface immediately. If you pray with the person, the demon may surface during prayer. If that doesn’t happen, you may need to use a more direct command, such as “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command that any demon the Holy Spirit lays his finger on identify himself.” I’d do this, however, only after careful consideration of all known factors.

Leadership: Do you get the person’s permission to call out demons?

Warner: Yes, that’s essential. You must have their cooperation. Ultimately, the aim is to help people become their own deliverers. They should never have to depend totally on an “exorcist” to resist the Devil and make him flee.

Dependence can be a problem for any counselor, and especially for those who include deliverance in their ministry. One man told me of a pastor who said his church of sixty was probably as big as it could get because he couldn’t keep more people than that free of demons. It’s ridiculous to foster that kind of dependency. The aim is to instruct people so thoroughly about their position in Christ that they can do their own resisting.

It’s not a formula or a rite that sets people free; it is helping them learn to claim their position in Christ and to use the “weapons of our warfare” to bring down spiritual strongholds. Unless they learn to do that, they will constantly return for deliverance.

On the other hand, too many people ignore the Devil. He doesn’t flee when you ignore him. He flees when you resist him.

Leadership: What are other ways to approach this situation?

Bussell: The early church fathers would repeat the Apostles’ Creed because just in stating the creed you are saying “God is sovereign.” The subtle danger in dealing with the demonic is we begin to believe evil is sovereign.

For example, God has been working in wonderful ways in the lives of some people I know. When I share that with friends, the immediate response is “Watch out for the Devil. He’ll be after them.” That’s a glorification of evil. Yes, they’re going to struggle, but God is ultimately sovereign.

Leadership: If a person comes to you and says, “I think I’m possessed,” how would you proceed?

Palmer: I would never want to mock someone’s self-perception, even if I felt strongly he were perhaps confused or hysterical. But I would also want a strategy that slows everything down. I would refuse to be panicked and rush into a hasty conclusion. I think that’s what our Lord does in John 8 when the adulterous woman is thrown at his feet. That’s why he writes in the sand, as I understand it.

I would want to focus that person’s eyes on Jesus Christ and leave aside the possibility of demon possession. Then I’d pray that if there is temptation by the Devil, we claim victory in the name of Christ over whatever evil this person is facing.

In order to be effective as a pastor, I don’t have to come to a judgment about the full nature of the evil the person is struggling with. I can claim Christ’s victory over anything. I would counsel pastors against announcing that this was, in fact, demon possession. I would rather announce what is positive: Jesus Christ is Lord over all demons, over hell itself, and over death. I’d claim his victory.

I would make the prayer as simple as possible. I am wary of elaborate procedures for casting out demons. The gospel encourages me to take the simplest and most direct route, and that is to claim the victory of Christ. The less said, the better.

Leadership: What experiences have you had that you would consider encounters with the demonic?

Palmer: A woman once came to me in great terror. She felt unable to live in her house because certain closets had been cursed. I didn’t want to get bogged down in debating whether those closets were cursed, so I used the approach I outlined. I did not make fun of her perception. We simply prayed for God’s victory over evil. In her case, I felt it was right to go to her house with another pastor and pray, claiming God’s victory and his protection over her. She never brought up that question again.

Karl Barth said that he wonders about the possibility of evil spirits, but the fact is that even if they are there, why should he worry about them? Jesus Christ is Lord.

When Barth went back to Germany after World War II, he met theologian after theologian who said, “We have been through a demonic period with Adolf Hitler.” Even non-Christians were saying, “What we’ve experienced was demonic.” Everyone claimed, in effect, “The Devil was responsible.” Barth said he yearned to hear someone say, “We sinned.” He felt there wouldn’t be help until they could admit their own culpability.

That’s what concerns me. We say, “Ah, that’s the Devil at work. We’ll conquer the Devil.” What about the Lord’s “Go and sin no more”? He calls us to responsible discipleship. As a pastor, my goal in people’s lives is to claim Christ’s victory and then to call them to the way of discipleship-to make responsible, free choices in favor of God’s will.

I have to be careful that saying “I’m possessed” doesn’t become the deception.

Erickson: When I pray with someone I think is possessed, I don’t do it alone. I have several people with me. One reason is the deception. You need to have people there to help discern what’s going on. You dare not, with your little bit of knowledge, do it yourself. You need a community.

In the sixties I saw a lot of kids get into the demonic through drugs. One fellow who now is a responsible executive was following a guru, and I’m convinced he was possessed. We prayed with him and commanded the demon to leave, but it didn’t. His mother prayed with him that evening, and he was delivered-and went into a profound depression for four months. He finally did come to faith, but this business of dealing with evil is not clear-cut.

Palmer: Simplicity, however, is key. The gospel can be understood by a four-year-old, and I think the battle with evil can be understood by a four-year-old, too. The moment it becomes so technical it can’t be understood, I think we’re in effect honoring the Devil through the back door by giving him more authority than he really has.

As I see it in the Bible, cosmic evil has only the power of tempting us or slandering us. That’s why we have to be careful about saying the Evil One loves to get us to do such-and-such. That’s incorrect.

Erickson: What about the Bible’s statements that he has the power of death or that he can devour you?

Palmer: The Book of Revelation even places boundaries around that by using the term second death. Only God has the power of the second death. And that’s God’s sovereign decision. So whatever power the Evil One exercises, it is bounded.

Warner: I have difficulty saying that all Satan can do is tempt or slander. Demons can do far more than that. They can create illness in our bodies. They can affect the physical world in significant ways. I wish that weren’t so, but I’ve witnessed it.

Leadership: For example?

Warner: We counseled a man who told us there were three generations of people practicing witchcraft in his family, and they had apparently put curses on his family and things in the house. One of the items was a locket. So we told him to destroy it. If there weren’t a curse on it, so what? It would be gone, and they would feel better about it. If there were, we’d be rid of it.

The man’s brother took it out in the street and hit it with a hammer a few times. When he went to pick it up, it was gone-just gone! The chain was there, the ring it hung on was there, but the locket was simply gone. Not in pieces-gone. What do you tell them if demons don’t have that kind of power over the physical world?

Palmer: I’d still define that as tempting, or deceiving. You see, Satan is also called the Deceiver. The deception may take all kinds of forms that are baffling to us, but it would be deception to say he has great power over our lives. The deception would be to get us to focus our eyes on some abnormal manifestation of power, and in so doing, honor the Devil. Then he would have deceived us.

Erickson: I agree that God is sovereign, but he also gave us Ephesians, which says to put on all the armor. Satan produces broken people. He can incite us to evil, to wars, to beat our children.

If we have a relationship with God, then we can stand against evil. If we don’t have that relationship, although Satan is obviously not sovereign, he’s certainly a lot tougher than we are. He’s going to influence us.

Bussell: It’s the subtle belief that evil is sovereign that is the greatest deception of all in the church. That’s what disables us. Once we believe that, we lose power over evil.

Leadership: How does that loss of power manifest itself?

Warner: Fear. If you mention demons to the average group of Christians, they say, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that!”

Lying behind a lot of our problems today is a fallacious world view. Our culture basically says that if there is a supernatural realm, it’s “up above” the natural realm. Occasionally these two may meet in religious experiences, but they’re considered fundamentally different worlds.

But this isn’t a divided world. God is as active in the natural as he is in the spiritual. And the spirits, the angels, the demons are as active “down here” as they are “up there” in the spiritual world. We need to see people as whole, not split into two parts.

Leadership: Some people seem to cause hurt continually. How do you deal with the evil people you’re bound to run into in ministry?

Erickson: I have encountered people who have done evil things, but I haven’t met one that meant to. I find each one, at the root, is driven by voices other than the Holy Spirit, and he’s not aware of it.

There’s a man I know, for instance, who I think could kill someone, given the right circumstances. From a medical standpoint, he has psychopathic tendencies. People like him have an overriding voice within that says, Survive at all costs. If you have to jettison a child, or a wife, or the pastor, you do it-whatever is necessary to survive.

People like this come to church because of their need to be acceptable. All of life is a drive for perfection, and thus acceptance. They remove any dirt, and so if they find an imperfection in the pastor-you’re in danger! They become avenging angels if anyone brings disorder to their world. And a pastor is a prime person to do just that. Fortunately, these people are rare.

Leadership: How do you handle such people?

Erickson: I refer them to a highly trained counselor.

But much more common are the good Christian people who become angry-perhaps with good reason-and their sometimes-uncontrolled anger causes alienation. At times I sit down individually with people like this and say, “I want to know all your criticisms,” and they produce long lists. I tell them, “OK. If I’ve offended you, I ask your forgiveness. I’ll work on these things, and I love you.”

If things blow up again, I ask our staff to sit in. After listening to their concerns, usually I’ll say something like this: “Obviously I’m not perfect, and I still need to work on every one of your criticisms. But there’s one thing I want you to know: if you leave this church, you’ll break my heart.”

Often they will turn to the others and ask, “Do you think there’s anything to my concerns?”

My colleagues usually reply, “Mark’s not perfect. Some of your concerns he’s dealt with, others aren’t valid, and some he’s working on. But we think the bigger problem is your anger.” If the person will accept this perspective and allow us to pray together, I’ve seen the Holy Spirit drain the anger out of people as if you had pulled a cork.

There is something disturbing these people, and I have somehow set it off. I think the key is telling people they mustn’t leave. That sets the stage for us to find a way to live together.

Sometimes people fall into a critical trap because they had a critical parent-a father or mother who never told them they did anything right. So they always have that voice saying, You’re not good enough. They can turn into angry people with Christian facades, people who alienate others in the church. I believe most problem people in our churches don’t want to be that way, but there’s a voice driving them. If you or I would hear it, we’d probably be the same way.

Palmer: The key is not letting someone else set the agenda. Mark, you don’t play the scenario in which you are supposed to reject these people and they feel angry and leave the church. Breaking through that scenario and giving a different response is what I think Jesus meant by turning your cheek. That’s not weakness but strength. Hold your ground, but hold it with style. It takes a lot of skill to hold to your instinct and not be entrapped in a harmful scenario.

An example-someone who’s very angry. The person may have good reason, but in effect, he or she is battling your authority. So why not give that person authority over you in another area? I try to find a way to let that person be one up on me in some benign way, like asking a favor of him or her.

Evil is disarmed by being absorbed. That’s what Jesus did on the cross. Now we can’t be redeemers, but sometimes we can absorb evil and not simply isolate it.

Bussell: We invite anger when we teach the grace of God. If I’m trying to model God’s unconditional acceptance, then I’m inviting them to express their inner selves. By teaching the doctrine of grace, I invite people to be real with their hostility. The tragedy is, we’re surprised at the anger. We should say, “This is a sign that God is working, and they feel free enough to let this come out.”

Erickson: I have an example of that. A woman’s husband left her with a couple of kids, and she was angry. She listened to me preach and then put all my mistakes in a letter. By the time I got to the second page, I was really steamed-and hurt, too.

Then I began to think about this woman’s situation: she’s angry but hasn’t been close enough to anyone recently to vent it. So here I am. I wrote her a letter saying, “You’re angry. Let’s talk about it.”

She came, and I thought, Boy, I’m really asking for it! But she sat down like a kitten. I said, “Hey, I love you. What can we do?”

The anger was gone; she’d gotten rid of it and wasn’t even carrying it anymore. And then she said, “I was in the radical feminist movement, but that’s not where I want to go. What does it really mean to be a woman?” We began to talk about it, and she’s gone a long way.

Leadership: What about the times when the anger hasn’t all been spewed out or absorbed? Do you ever have to take measures to protect yourself or other people from the angry person?

Palmer: Sometimes I have to invoke the law. After all, that’s what “the righteous sword” is. No human being should be threatened. I’ll ask straight out, “Are you threatening me?” When you ask that, it is usually a shock, since people rarely realize that’s what they’re doing. I continue, “Because if you are, I’m going to tell the police I’m under threat by you. I don’t have to be threatened by anybody.”

Leadership: Is it common to be threatened?

Palmer: It’s a rare occurrence, but you have to be alert to it. You need to be street wise-maintain a reality orientation at all times-or you’re no help.

I made use of the Berkeley police with great effect once when a young man called, very depressed, and spoke about life not being worth living. I didn’t feel good about the conversation, so I called the police and said, “I just talked to a man at such-and-such an address. I think he might hurt himself. Would you please check in on him?” Within three minutes a policeman was at the door, saying, “Reverend Palmer called and said he’s concerned about you.”

That was a splash of cold water in this kid’s face. He called me that night and said, “I didn’t mean it. I’ll never commit suicide. But I’m glad you called them.” It showed him I cared, but that uniformed officer standing at the door was also a restraining presence that shocked him into realizing how serious it is to play this threatening game with people.

I think I once saved a child from further abuse because I reported it. That’s what being street wise is: we have redemptive concern, but we also know when we’re out of our league. We should be stewards of all the resources at our disposal, including psychiatry and medicine-even the police-when we’re dealing with evil or anger.

Leadership: What other street-wise lessons have you learned about dealing with evil?

Bussell: You have to help people develop interests outside the area that’s obsessing them, because the more you focus on the problem, the more you feed the obsession. They need to see there are other things in life that God has given them, rather than this one area where evil has surfaced.

Take sexual temptation, for example. The more a person prays about sexual temptation, the more he’s obsessed by it. Don’t focus on that one aspect of reality. Give him something else so this doesn’t become the one issue. Focusing on the evil alone can actually add to his pathology.

Erickson: Leanne Payne calls that “practicing the presence of their problem.” Christianity is practicing the presence of Christ.

Bussell: I’ve adopted a principle: If I have to confront a power-hungry or vindictive person in a public meeting, I commit myself to take that person out to lunch twice in the next two weeks, and after that, once a month. Unless I’m willing to block out that time, I will not confront, because that person is hurting. Meeting with the person builds a relationship. When we don’t have a relationship, we begin to construct images of each other that often are projections of our own insecurities.

Leadership: With multiple dangers and deceptions abounding, it seems you have to tread lightly through the wreckage of evil. What gives you hope?

Warner: Demons are able to cause harm, and we need to be ready to deal with them, but not from a stance of fear or subservience. We don’t operate toward victory; we operate out of victory. Christ won an absolute victory at the Cross.

Palmer: I’m impressed by Paul’s attitude in Romans, his major work. Only twice does he make reference to the Devil, and in both cases he is pointing to the Devil’s weakness. He uses the term principalities in Romans 8: no “principalities . . . will be able to separate us from God’s love.” And then in the sixteenth chapter: it is God’s will to “crush Satan under your feet.”

We’ve got to keep that fundamental ground rule in mind: The good news is that the power within us is greater than the power that is without.

Pastors

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER

Paul D. Robbins

In a couple of weeks I’ll be fifty years old. This birthday will be remembered by me not so much for hitting the half-century mark but for a virus commonly known as infectious mononucleosis.

Yes, I have adult mono. No, I haven’t been kissing anyone lately (other than my wife), thank you. I’ve lived with this malady for five months without the foggiest notion of how I contracted it or when it will go away. It’s not something you fight with pills and trips to the doctor.

Mono is persistent and decimating. Within five hours of arising each morning, I abruptly collapse in total fatigue, as if someone shuts off the energy valve. My body no longer responds to the directives of my brain.

Being intense, somewhat driven, perpetually guilty of over-scheduling, and then pushing myself to the limit to keep all my promises has only exacerbated my discomfort. But, like it or not, at about 1 P.M. every day, my energy tank runs dry, and I’m through until morning. The number of unreturned phone calls, unfinished letters, and missed meetings doesn’t matter. Even if I took six months off and went fishing, by 1 P.M. I wouldn’t care about fish, lakes, or time off-only about lying down for the next twelve hours.

One of my friends, a well-meaning Job’s comforter, suggested that I monitor this experience, especially my attitudes toward it, to see what I could learn. Halfheartedly I began to track my thoughts and responses. Rather quickly, I realized I was associating a looming energyless fiftieth birthday with unusually frequent thoughts about my mortality.

I also realized I was spiritually tired of being physically tired. There’s an enormous difference between fatigue produced by long hours, hard work, and difficult problems, and fatigue induced by an energy-draining illness. The latter penetrates the soul with a creeping sense of uselessness, worthlessness, and helplessness.

Finally, my mental note taking revealed a deep fear of entrapment. I could do nothing about this situation-no medicine I could take, no physician’s orders I could follow, no therapy to employ. I was boxed in until this condition went away. Until then I might have enough daily energy to let everyone know I’m still here-restless, inquisitive, concerned, anxious, irritable, depressed-but unable to carry my share of the workload. It’s like being strapped in a straitjacket and then slowly pushed toward a pit. So much for monitoring.

Help came from an unexpected source. One evening I flipped on the TV and saw Mike Wallace-caustic, feisty Mike, skewer of the best and brightest. As the sound came on, I heard Mike say, “. . . and she is one of the most impressive-if not the most impressive-ladies I’ve ever interviewed. She has my highest admiration.” The lady was Beverly Sills, the internationally acclaimed opera singer who directs the New York Opera Company. The dialogue revealed that Ms. Sills struggled unrecognized and unrewarded for many years. She was refused entry into the prestigious American opera circles. After repeated rejections, she went to Europe and slowly built a reputation with tough European audiences through her brilliant singing and acting-until American critics were forced to recognize her.

But the heart of the interview was not about music but about her triumph over personal pain and heartbreak. Ms. Sills is the mother of two handicapped children, one of whom is severely retarded. She lost everything when her home on Martha’s Vineyard, purchased to escape the demanding life of New York City, burned to the ground two days before moving in.

As I watched, I was captivated by her radiant spirit. Every response breathed contentment and serenity. Laughter punctuated her phrases, but her wit never became flippant or fatalistic. Though she had clearly experienced pain and loss, she took an impish delight in the fact that close friends call her “Bubbles.”

When Mike asked how she had been able to integrate the great triumphs with the defeats, she answered, “I choose to be cheerful. Years ago I realized that I often had little or no choice about success, circumstances, or even happiness; but I knew I could choose to be cheerful.”

It doesn’t take much observation to discover there aren’t many cheerful people in the world, even among Christians. And yet the admonition of our Lord is, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). It’s interesting that this directive was given during the uncertainties, unsettledness, and premonitions of the Upper Room encounter. These words are the connecting link between Christ’s announcement that he would soon be leaving his followers and his prayer that the Father would protect them from the Evil One.

Pondering these dynamics has affirmed a basic truth for me: the importance of choosing does not diminish with age and illness. To choose is to engage the gears of life; to choose correctly is to engage life correctly.

As a younger man just entering the ministry, I was told that choosing correctly would determine the future. Right choices would become the rails on which my life would run. As I made those choices, I also subconsciously sensed that if I somehow chose incorrectly, the advantages of youth would provide enough time and energy to recoup some of my losses.

As we get older, the recouping options diminish with increasing rapidity. But no circumstance can ever take away my freedom to choose how I will respond to my circumstances.

To choose, to engage correctly, has taken on far greater significance than it did twenty-five years ago. There are still so many rails to be laid, and they must be laid carefully and prayerfully.

I choose life. I choose hard work. I choose faith, hope, and love. I choose unity, commitment, and obedience. Most of all, I choose cheerfulness.

Paul D. Robbins is executive vice-president of Christianity Today, Inc.

- More from Paul D. Robbins

Pastors

LEADERSHIP BIBLIOGRAPHY—UNITY

Richard C. Halverson

For nearly six years, Richard Halverson has served as chaplain of the United States Senate. Prior to that, as pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., he gained the reputation of a pastor whose congregation modeled unity. Here are the books he recommends on that subject.

I feel the “how-to syndrome” tends to replace the dynamics of faith with mechanics. So these books may address only indirectly the theme of unity, but each deals in a fundamental sense with the subject.

The Reformed Pastor: A Pattern for Personal Growth and Ministry by Richard Baxter (Multnomah).

The Reformed Pastor is required reading for the church servant who takes pastoral care seriously. It is simply impossible to exaggerate the effectiveness of Baxter’s pastoral ministry. The details of his life, his suffering, his perseverance, his prolific work, and his priority on pastoral care nearly overwhelm us as they challenge, inspire, and instruct us about the basics of unity.

Caring Enough to Confront by David Augsburger (Regal). Unity suffers when conflicts boil under the surface and finally explode. This classic book—simple to read, yet profound in significance—points the way to authentic relationships in congregations. Unity doesn’t come from an ostrich-like approach to differences. When people care enough to confront and love enough to do it positively, a church can combine diverse elements and yet maintain oneness.

Hey, That’s Our Church by Lyle E. Schaller (Abingdon). This book touches on the unity of believers through Schaller’s penetrating analysis of church life. The book is a clinical study of many types of churches by a scholar who has “visited approximately three thousand congregations in forty states and three nations during the past fifteen years.” He once advised me, “Priority should be given to relationships rather than programs or projects.” My impression is that congregations do well when small groups, house churches, or their equivalents proliferate. There is no substitute for the loving, caring, supporting group that holds a disciple of Christ accountable—and united to the congregation.

The Place of Help by Oswald Chambers (Grosset and Dunlap). A psychiatrist told me, “If the members of a congregation cared for each other as the New Testament teaches, there would be much less need for people in my profession.” That care, found among church friends, keeps churches whole and healthy. Oswald Chambers stands out as my favorite devotional writer, and I used his Place of Help as a text for my elders in a series of studies on a congregation’s care for one another. Implicit throughout these devotional readings is the cry for unity among Christian brothers and sisters.

True Fellowship by Jerry Bridges (NavPress). The Navigators have long taught and practiced the necessity of fellowship and discipleship. In this volume, Bridges presents the essence of years of Navigator corporate learning and experience. The text Bridges uses to begin his book, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42), became the prescription for my ministry at Fourth Presbyterian Church more than twenty years ago.

A Living Fellowship—A Dynamic Witness by Richard C. Halverson (Zondervan). I suggest this book not because I wrote it but because it contains a record of a congregation that made a conscious effort to conform to the pattern of Acts 2:42. Not all churches will choose this same prototype, but it is good to know that unity is possible. The book chronicles how unity was worked out in our congregation as we took seriously our Lord’s words to his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).

108 LEADERSHIP/86

- More from Richard C. Halverson

Pastors

IDEAS THAT WORK

Thomas D. Kinnan

Leading the church to pray

LEADING THE CHURCH TO PRAY

Thomas D. Kinnan

“What can I do to mobilize prayer in my church?”

This question grew stronger and more insistent for me a few years ago. It wasn’t that I or the congregation needed to be convinced of prayer’s value. We had all heard-I had often preached-how essential prayer is to Christian living. But we rarely prayed in any powerful, consistent, or satisfying way.

What we needed was a specific way to actually begin praying, both individually and as a church. We hungered for a hands-on approach that would help make prayer a natural part of our church life.

I told my people, “My dream for this church is to see you praying for one another after every service, asking me to pray for you, even praying for one another over the phone if necessary.”

Our dream eventually crystallized in a program we developed called PRAYER (People Responsive and Yielded Experiencing Results). Since its inception more than three years ago, this simple approach has strengthened the people and ministries of the church.

How does it work?

Every three months, I announce that in a few weeks people will have the opportunity to become more involved in prayer through one or more of the following:

Prayer Partners-Two people who commit to pray with and for one another.

Prayer Corps-These individuals pray daily for the ministries and needs of the church. Each member of the Corps also prays silently during each service-for guests, for people who appear troubled, for those singing or playing special music, for the preacher.

Prayer Chain-People’s emergency needs are sent through a network of those who have committed themselves to pray immediately.

Prayer Vigil-Every weekend, from 8 P.M. Saturday until 8 A.M. Sunday, people pray during a particular half-hour or hour time slot.

Prayer and Fasting-People designate meal times to isolate themselves in the presence of the Lord for prayer instead of eating.

Then we distribute pencils and signup sheets for people to commit themselves, if they wish, to any or all of these areas for the next three months. We collect the sheets and turn them over to a deacon, who, with the help of the church secretaries, pairs the prayer partners and coordinates the prayer vigils and prayer chains. In addition, we distribute a weekly prayer bulletin to inform people of specific requests.

Originally we asked people for six-month and twelve-month commitments, but we have since found three months about right. The shorter period means we have to reorganize every three months, but more people get involved because they don’t feel locked in for an eternity. They can try the program for three months, take a breather, and come back to it.

Each quarter approximately eighty-five to ninety people commit themselves to one of the avenues of PRAYER. In our congregation of 320, this represents about 25 percent. Many involve themselves in several areas (even so, they don’t tie up any more evenings in a busy schedule). For example, in a recent quarter, we had approximately fifty people in the prayer chain, another fifty paired as prayer partners, fifty-two in the prayer corps, and forty-five involved in the prayer vigil. (We don’t ask for written commitments for the “prayer and fasting” area, so we don’t know the number involved there.)

Our children and youth also participate in PRAYER. They have their own prayer vigils. The children’s vigil runs from 6:30 to 8:30 each Thursday night, with each child taking a ten-minute slot; the teenagers pray in twenty minute slots each Saturday evening. The young people have their own prayer partners and commit themselves to be part of the prayer corps.

What has happened?

We’ve seen many answers to prayer: spiritual conversions, physical healings, material blessings. Many areas of the church have grown significantly. Within the first five weeks of the program, our average weekly attendance increased by fifty-three. We were growing before PRAYER began, but the rate of growth has climbed.

I’m not the only one who has sensed a new vibrancy, an expectant spirit in our services. Recently a couple from one of my former churches visited a Sunday service. “What’s going on here?” they asked afterwards. “We sensed the Holy Spirit so intensely during the service.”

Every Sunday, I know many people have invested heavily in the service. They’ve been praying for me and the sermon. They pick me up when I’m not doing my best. In my dozen years of ministry, I’ve never looked forward to worshiping as much as I do now.

Seeing people change gratifies me most. When we introduced PRAYER, people asked, “How can we pray for half an hour? We’ll exhaust our prayers in five minutes.” After the first prayer vigil, people told me, “We didn’t have enough time.”

We asked people what their involvement in PRAYER has meant. Their comments:

“It’s a discipline; it made me pray.”

“PRAYER has taught us how to pray.”

“I’ve become more aware of the needs of the church.”

“PRAYER has made us feel more a part of the church.”

PRAYER is certainly not the only way to mobilize a church to pray, but it has helped us convert our desire to pray into actual prayer.

Thomas D. Kinnan is pastor of Fairlawn Heights Wesleyan Church in Topeka, Kansas.

MORE IDEAS

Missionaries by Video

With missionaries coming home on furlough only once every four or five years, and with new people joining the church in between, how can members really get to know the missionaries they support? The Evangelical Free Church of Chico, California, was wrestling with that question.

Then a church-supported missionary family sent a video tape showing its living situation, family life, and ministry.

The missions committee viewed it and realized they had learned more about the family in fifteen minutes than they had previously over several years. The committee decided to ask other church missionary families to prepare video tapes for the annual missions conference.

The committee asked four missionary families to prepare two fifteen minute video tapes each. The first, to be shown to adults, would give a general overview of the family’s ministry, living conditions, and daily routine. The second tape, intended for children, would show the family’s ministry through the eyes of the children-schools they attend, friends they play with, what they think about their parents’ work.

By providing these broad guidelines and setting a fifteen-minute limit per tape, the committee insured each video would be lively and fast moving. The committee requested that tapes be compatible with American equipment and sent money to each family (through its missions agency) to cover production costs.

“God worked in each situation to make the tapes possible,” reports Larry Hobbs, pastor of caring ministries. “Two families in remote areas ‘just happened’ to have someone there a the right time who could produce video tape. Another family made the tape on its own and did a very good job-not professional perhaps, but not hokey, either. The other missionaries do ‘tentmaking’ work in a video studio, so they had the equipment and expertise.”

Each night of the missions conference, the adults viewed one of the tapes on large-screen monitors and prayed for that family’s ministry. At the same time, preschool- and primary-aged children watched the children’s video.

“The tapes stripped away the missionary mystique to let us see real people living real lives,” Hobbs says. “We could see where they lived, where they worked, the people they ministered to. We could attach faces to names from their letters. We all found it easier to pray for people when we really knew who they were. Several people told me the tapes were the best part of the conference.”

The idea has grown to a year-round way to keep missionaries fresh in people’s minds. The committee not only shows the original four families’ videos in small groups throughout the year, but has asked other missionary families to make tapes. Each month it highlights one of these families by showing its video to adult Sunday school classes.

Christmas Program Covers by Children

The Sunday school department at Christ the King Lutheran Church, Southgate, Michigan, has added a creative twist to the annual Christmas program. Their simple idea involves all the students, saves money, and reinforces the message of the program to both students and parents.

“We were planning the annual Sunday school Christmas program about four or five years ago, and as usual, were trying to figure out how to involve every student,” says Robert D’Ambrosio, director of Christian education. “The planning committee hit on having the children individually illustrate the covers for the bulletin.”

They selected a theme and printed the covers-completely blank except for the name and address of the church and the date of the program.

On a Sunday late in November, the covers were distributed to the Sunday school teachers. They explained the theme to students and had each illustrate that theme on several blank covers, using crayons, colored pencils, paint, or ink. Pupils in the nursery and kindergarten classes colored a predrawn stencil. The teachers then used the bulletins as a pre-session activity on the successive Sundays before the program. Each child signed the covers he or she had illustrated.

The idea saved the congregation the expense of professionally-printed covers, but the real gain was with the students and the people who came to the Christmas program.

“Parents got together after the service to compare covers,” D’Ambrosio says. “They appreciated the personal touch, so they took the bulletins with them. Fewer were left in the pews or on the floor. Each student, by creating an original illustration, learned more about the program’s message. And the students received compliments on their artwork.”

Modern Swaddling Clothes

Christ Lutheran Church in Visalia, California, has over the years collected food, clothing, shoes, and school supplies for the poor of their community. Recently the church came up with an unusual, yet decidedly practical, way to help needy people.

“We were reading the Christmas story as a devotional before a meeting of our social concerns committee,” reports Pastor Paul Thomton. “Someone read, ‘She gave birth to her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling cloths.’ That phrase brought to mind a project some of us had helped with the previous summer. We were distributing food in a migrant labor camp, and as we approached one home, a young mother ran to put a disposable diaper on her naked baby. The very poor, who often lack laundry facilities, depend on disposable diapers, yet have trouble affording them. This woman had been trying to conserve her limited supply. It occurred to us that disposable diapers are in some sense the swaddling cloths of our day.”

The church decided to collect disposable diapers during the month of December. Families were encouraged to buy disposable diapers and offer them in the name of the Christ child. Over 7,000 diapers were collected and turned over to Catholic Social Services, which distributed them to poorer families in the community throughout the year.

Says Thomton: “We have fed the hungry, visited prisoners, welcomed strangers. Collecting disposable diapers has been one way for us to begin to ‘clothe the naked.’ “

What’s Worked for You?

Each account of a local church doing something in a fresh, effective way earns up to $30. Send your description of a helpful ministry, method, or approach to:

Ideas That Work

LEADERSHIP

465 Gundersen Drive

Carol Stream, IL 60188

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Pastors

IS IT WORTH A BATTLE?

Ernest Beevers

Our nominating committee was stuck! We couldn’t agree on anything-not a Sunday school director, not even a department director. Every time a name was suggested, Fred would object. We had no men both qualified and willing to take any of the key leadership positions, and Fred was set against having a woman in any position “over” men. We had a problem.

As pastor, I badly wanted to get the Sunday school staffed with able, committed directors. I also wanted to work through the differences Fred had with other committee members.

I suggested to Fred that we meet privately to examine the Bible teachings on the role and ministry of women in the church. We studied 1 Timothy 2:11-15, Galatians 3:28-29, Ephesians 5:21-30, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 and other Scriptures. I pointed out the leadership roles played by Priscilla, Phoebe, and Deborah-all to no avail. Fred was immovable.

As I weighed the situation, I developed the following grid as an analytical tool.

X-coordinate: Degree of Certainty, or “How sure I am that I am right.”

Y-coordinate: Degree of Importance of the Issue, or “How important this matter is to me.”

On any given issue or question, each individual has a unique viewpoint. The person must determine how much intrinsic importance this matter has and also the degree of certainty of that position.

For point A on the grid: I am absolutely certain the toothpaste tube should be rolled up from the bottom. But on the scale of importance, I do not place it very high. Therefore I will not break fellowship with my wife if she persists in squeezing it in the middle! I won’t even rant.

For point B: Euthanasia is a very important matter; it involves taking a life. But under what conditions should life support systems be suspended? And who pulls the plug? Serious questions leave me uncertain that my position is right. I am reluctant to press my viewpoint. I wouldn’t break fellowship with a fellow minister who sees the matter differently.

An interesting set of patterns begins to emerge when you compare the grids of two persons who disagree over a particular issue.

How did this tool work in the conflict with Fred? He strongly opposed nominating women to any position of authority over men. He agreed to the nomination of a woman as preschool division director so long as no men worked in that division. As our discussions progressed, it became clear that he believed his position was scriptural and right. He put his X well to the right on the grid. He also said this matter had a high degree of importance, which moved his X toward the top of the grid. His X on the grid was now located close to the “Region of Conflict.” Most people positioned in that area on a given issue will fight for their views.

As I examined my own convictions on the role and place of women in the church, I felt he was wrong in his interpretation of Scripture. However, I was not absolutely sure I was right. I didn’t want to break fellowship with Fred or see this matter develop into a church fight when I was still undecided.

I suggested each committee member be free to express opinions but that we agree to let the committee decide on the nominees by majority vote. Everyone agreed-even Fred! We also agreed that none of us would campaign for our position or try to impose our interpretations on the church body. Under these conditions we could agree to disagree and maintain fellowship, each respecting the right of others to a different point of view.

Not every disagreeing person will soften to the point of submitting his convictions to the will of the majority. But the grid has proved to be a useful tool for objectively discussing our respective positions and thinking through how far we would go in insisting on our own way. This approach also kept the church from becoming embroiled in a potentially divisive issue.

-Ernest Beevers

West Hills Baptist Church

Coraopolis, Pennsylvania

- More from Ernest Beevers

Pastors

THE ONE MINUTE PASTOR

Bob Cohen

The One Minute Manager, The One Minute Parent, The One Minute Mother, and The One Minute Father. As a busy pastor, I must confess these titles intrigued me. With a new church in a new city, a new house, and a new daughter, I thought I’d found the answer to my time management needs.

I resolved, “I’ll be the ‘One Minute Pastor.’ ” Here’s my plan.

Mornings-Rise at 5:30 A.M. and gulp down an Instant Breakfast. Then off to my study for my One Minute Quiet Time. This includes One Minute of Prayer and Intercession followed by One Minute of Bible Reading, One Minute Meditation, and One Minute Application. Now to One Minute Sermon Preparation for Sunday’s One Minute Message following One Minute Praise and Worship.

Time for lunch. I’ll tell my secretary I’ll be back in a minute and head to the fast food drive-thru. There’s a new one in town you can drive by at thirty-five miles an hour and they throw the food in the window if you’ve called ahead.

Afternoons-One Minute Counseling follows my One Minute Dictation. But overnight express mail will not get my letter to its destination on time-I’ll send it ZAP mail! One Minute Discipleship and One Minute Leadership Training finish my full day at the office. I head home for the evening. My car accelerates zero to sixty in five seconds. How useful! I’m home in sixty seconds.

Evenings-As you might have guessed, our family dinner hour has been shaved fifty-nine minutes. Before putting the children to bed we have One Minute Family Time. With the children in bed, my wife is entitled to some time with her One Minute Husband. After One Minute Conversation, I’m ready for television. A remote control switch is essential to not waste time getting up to flip through the channels. In a minute I’m ready for bed. It’s been a long, full day.

I’m glad it’s not quantity time but quality time that counts. Maybe that’s what Daniel meant in chapter 12: “Even to the end: many shall run to and fro.” It does puzzle me, though, why Jesus once asked the disciples, “Could you not watch with me for an hour?” What does that mean?

Well, no time to think about that now. I’ve got to squeeze in my One Minute Prayers. How else can I expect a One Minute Revival?

-Bob Cohen

Tri-County Christian Community

Akron, Ohio

- More from Bob Cohen

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